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Clicking on the Preferences link in the upper right while logged in allows you to change your preferences. You will be presented with the User profile section, as well as a bar of tabs across the top for changing other types of settings.

Username: Your user name. Only bureaucrats can change your username, and the wiki must also have the Renameuser extension installed.

User ID: A number assigned to your account when you created it (for example, if your number is 42 you are the 42nd user to sign up at this particular wiki). This number is used for internal purposes.

Number of edits: How many edits you have made. Not all wikis will have this.

Real name: If provided, this will be used for attribution (rather than using your username). Providing your real name is entirely optional. Some wikis do not have this option.

Email: Your email address, if you have supplied one. You can also change or remove your address here.

New signature: When you sign your name (using ~~~~), what you enter here will be used at the start instead of a simple link to your user page. By default, anything you enter here will be wrapped with [[ ]]; if you want to use special linking, enable Raw signatures (without automatic link).

Language: This controls what language the interface is displayed in. MediaWiki's default interface includes localisations for all supported languages, but this is not necessarily the case with extensions or custom skins. Page text will not be translated, nor will templates (unless the templates integrate text localisation).

To change your password, enter your old password in the first box and your new password in the last two. If you want this site to remember your login, check Remember my login on this computer. Note that this function requires you to have cookies enabled in your browser, and if your cookie is cleared or expires you will no longer be remembered.

If you have supplied an email address, you will need to click the verify address button in order to use these functions. You will receive an email; simply open it and follow the link to enable the following functions.

From your preferences you can select what language you would like the interface to be in. Only the buttons like 'edit' and 'talk', in addition to a few pages in the sidebar, will be affected. The main text of the pages will not be changed by this for the vast majority of pages, although there are a few pages where it will, like some in the Wikimedia Meta Wiki.

Here you can choose the skin you want to use. You can preview the available skins before choosing them, by clicking on the "Preview" link next to each skin. Please refer to Help:Skins for more details.

Here you can control how mathematical equations described using the Extension:Math tag will be displayed. Mathematical formulae uploaded as images or written outside the math tag will not be affected by this setting. Note the math preferences will only be visible if Extension:Math is installed.

PNG images

MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools)

Here you can determine how images will be displayed. Images displayed by direct pasting of a URL (if the wiki has it enabled) will not be affected by this setting.

Image size limit:(for file description pages) This setting lets you choose how big image previews will be on the Image: pages. If you know what your current screen resolution is you may like to set this to one or two sizes smaller than your own screen. If you have a slow connection (such as dial-up) you may want to limit them to 320×240.

Thumbnail size: Define how big you want thumbnails to appear. This setting will not affect thumbnails with dimensions determined by an editor, nor can it increase images beyond their original dimensions.

Days to show in recent changes: Here you can specify how far back the recent changes pages will go. Note that the list will stop prematurely if the number of edits is exceeded (see below).

Number of edits to show by default: Here you can specify how many edits should be displayed.

Hide minor edits from recent changes: This enables you to hide edits marked as minor (see Help:Editing pages). Since some users will rapidly make a lot of tiny tweaks to update templates or fix spelling errors you may find enabling this to be useful. You can also turn this on temporarily from the recent changes page (see Help:Tracking changes).

Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist: Enhanced recent changes condenses edits into a per-page list. As indicated, this requires JavaScript to be enabled. See Help:Tracking changes for more information on this feature.

These are the settings to control the behavior of the watchlist (See Help:Watchlist). Most of these options are also available on the watchlist display itself, but by setting them in your preferences, you control the default behavior of the watchlist i.e., it will perform the same actions every time you visit the page.

Default settings for searches including how many results to display and how much context to show for each result. Check the boxes next to the namespaces which you want to show up, the first time that you search for something. You can override this when doing an actual search, by checking or unchecking the boxes at the bottom of the search results screen.